>>1900242A solid 35% of farmers are borderline retarded and don't give a fuck about anything other than money and status. I'd like to think the rest are reasonable and fairly smart. The large chicken and duck houses make so much money that no farmer would care about ethics. The setup costs are high and there are fairly specific criteria needed to build such sheds but a guy near me has three duck houses each probably 100mx20m and he reckons he's earning after expenses about 50k a year each from them. Large farms around here, despite farming beef which is not very profitable (and also not requiring a massive amount of work) can easily earn over 100k gbp a year in government subsidies no risk and then on the other hand arable farmers, with subsidies may just about break even on a bad year purely due to the higher costs associated with the equipment needed, so unfortunately if things like roundup were banned arable farms would probably die off in a few years. using pesticides on crops happens mostly when the crop has already died so i'd imagine the crops wouldn't absorb it?
